I am a naturalistic theologian.
For a long time, I have been cautious about saying that quite so plainly.
Part of that caution has been pastoral. I know how deeply religious beliefs can be woven into a person's identity, family, community, hopes, fears, and understanding of existence. I have had no desire to shock people simply for the pleasure of shocking them. Nor am I interested in ridiculing belief or treating believers as intellectually deficient.
But there comes a point at which caution can become concealment.
I think I have reached that point.
I am not a Christian, and I am not a supernaturalist. I do not believe there is sufficient evidence to conclude that gods, supernatural beings, or supernatural realms exist independently of human culture and imagination.
Yet I remain a theologian.
More than that, I remain profoundly interested in religion.
That may sound contradictory, but it is only because we have inherited a very narrow understanding of theology.
If theology simply means the study of God, then naturally a theologian without God appears to be something like a zoologist without animals.
But I no longer understand theology that way.
I understand theology as the disciplined study of the meanings by which human beings orient themselves within existence.
Religion is one of the principal ways human cultures create, transmit, embody, challenge, and transform those meanings.
And religious experience is among the most powerful forms in which human beings encounter them.
That is why I take religious experience seriously.
Very seriously.
The Experience Is Real
Human beings experience awe.
We experience transcendence.
We experience moments of profound unity in which the boundaries separating self, world, and others seem suddenly porous.
We experience grace.
We experience presence.
We experience calling, surrender, wonder, dread, gratitude, ecstasy, silence, beauty, reconciliation, and an overwhelming sense that something matters beyond our ordinary concerns.
Sometimes these experiences occur in churches, temples, mosques, synagogues, forests, deserts, hospital rooms, bedrooms, concert halls, laboratories, or beside the deathbeds of people we love.
Sometimes they are cultivated through ritual.
Sometimes they arrive without warning.
Sometimes they change a human life.
I have no interest whatsoever in explaining such experiences away.
To call them illusions simply because I do not accept their traditional supernatural explanations would strike me as intellectually lazy.
Something happened.
The person experienced something.
The experience may have rearranged the structure of that person's meaning, altered their behavior, healed a relationship, inspired courage, produced compassion, or changed the direction of an entire life.
That deserves attention.
But an experience and an explanation of an experience are not the same thing.
That distinction has become central to my theology.
Experience Is Not Explanation
Suppose someone tells me that while standing alone beneath a night sky, they suddenly experienced an overwhelming sense of unity with everything around them.
I believe them.
Suppose they tell me that they felt themselves held within a reality larger than themselves.
I believe that this is what they experienced.
Suppose they then say:
"God revealed himself to me."
Now something has changed.
We have moved from a report of experience to an interpretation of its cause.
That interpretation may be meaningful. It may belong to a tradition thousands of years old. It may provide a symbolic language through which the person can integrate what happened.
But it is nevertheless an interpretation.
The experience itself does not automatically establish the ontology attributed to it.
A feeling of presence does not demonstrate the existence of an invisible being.
An experience of transcendence does not demonstrate the existence of a supernatural realm.
An experience of grace does not demonstrate the existence of a supernatural giver.
That does not diminish the experience.
It simply requires us to distinguish carefully between what happened and what we say happened.
That distinction is not hostility toward religion.
It is intellectual responsibility.
The Question I Am Now Willing to Ask
For much of my life I have been reluctant to press this issue too strongly because I did not want conversations about religion to turn into contests.
I still do not.
But I have become increasingly convinced that supernatural claims should not receive an exemption from the standards we normally use when deciding what we believe exists.
If someone wishes to tell me that God exists—not merely as a symbol, metaphor, cultural construction, or meaning-bearing figure, but as an independently existing supernatural being—I think it is fair to ask:
What evidence warrants that conclusion?
The same applies to claims about supernatural realms, supernatural agencies, revelation, miracles, or interventions in the physical world.
I am open to evidence.
But the claim itself cannot serve as its own evidence.
Nor can the intensity of an experience establish the explanation placed upon it.
This does not mean that science has already explained every religious experience.
Of course it has not.
There are enormous regions of human consciousness, cognition, emotion, symbolic behavior, social formation, and embodied experience that remain poorly understood.
Mystery remains.
But mystery is not evidence for supernaturalism.
"I do not know" is one of the most important sentences available to the human mind.
It keeps inquiry alive.
I Do Not Want to Explain Religion Away
Naturalistic explanations of religion are sometimes accused of reductionism.
Religion, we are told, becomes "nothing but" psychology, sociology, neurology, evolutionary adaptation, ritual behavior, or cultural construction.
I share some of that concern.
Human realities can indeed be diminished by careless explanation.
A symphony is vibrations in air, but it is not merely vibrations in air.
Love involves neurochemistry, but love is not therefore adequately described by listing neurotransmitters.
A poem consists of marks or sounds, but describing its ink does not explain its meaning.
Likewise, religious experience arises within natural organisms, nervous systems, communities, languages, histories, symbols, rituals, memories, bodies, and environments.
Understanding those processes does not make the experience less meaningful.
It may allow us to understand more fully how meaning becomes possible.
Naturalism need not flatten the world.
It can deepen our intimacy with it.
There is only this world that we can demonstrate ourselves to inhabit.
But what a world it is.
Matter has become life.
Life has become awareness.
Awareness has become imagination.
Imagination has become language, music, ritual, mourning, mathematics, compassion, storytelling, theology, and the human capacity to stand beneath the stars and tremble with wonder.
I do not find that impoverished.
I find it astonishing.
I find it sacred.
Religion Without Supernaturalism
This is where my work with Opthē begins.
Religion, as I understand it, is not fundamentally belief in supernatural beings.
Religion is a universal human cultural behavior through which communities create and inhabit shared transcendent meaning.
Gods are one way human cultures have embodied such meaning.
They are powerful symbols.
They have carried ethical ideals, communal memories, fears, hopes, political structures, cosmologies, explanations of suffering, experiences of beauty, and visions of justice.
But the meanings carried by gods need not depend upon the literal existence of those gods.
Grace survives God.
Agapē survives God.
Compassion survives God.
Forgiveness survives God.
Hospitality survives God.
Wonder survives God.
Ritual survives God.
The sacred survives God.
And theology survives God.
Perhaps it even becomes more honest once it no longer needs to defend propositions about invisible realities for which it cannot produce adequate evidence.
Then theology can turn toward the extraordinary human phenomenon that has been before us all along:
meaning.
How do human beings create it?
How does it become shared?
How does it become sacred?
How does it become embodied in ritual?
How does it become distorted into ideology?
How does meaning inspire compassion in one community and violence in another?
How do symbols acquire authority?
How does religion liberate?
How does it become captured by power?
How do we create meanings capable of sustaining life rather than destroying it?
Those are theological questions.
They may be among the most urgent theological questions humanity has ever faced.
Why I Still Call Myself a Theologian
I did not stop being a theologian when I stopped believing in God.
My theological work brought me here.
Decades of studying scripture, religion, history, culture, psychology, human behavior, ritual, and meaning gradually made supernatural explanations less convincing to me, not more.
I could have abandoned theology altogether.
Instead, I came to believe that theology itself needed to be recovered.
The word theos need not imprison us within the question of supernatural beings.
For me, theology has become inquiry into the meanings human beings treat as ultimate—the meanings around which lives and cultures organize themselves.
Nation can become theos.
Money can become theos.
Race can become theos.
Security can become theos.
Progress can become theos.
God can become theos.
So can life.
The crucial theological question is not simply:
"What god do you believe in?"
It is:
What meaning governs your life?
And then:
What does that meaning cause you to become?
That is where theology becomes consequential.
The Ground on Which I Stand
So, I want to be clearer from now on.
I am a naturalistic theologian.
I am not interested in attacking Christianity or humiliating people who believe in supernatural realities.
I am interested in honest inquiry.
I do not dismiss religious experience.
Quite the opposite.
I have spent my life trying to understand it because I believe it is too important to leave unexplored or explained by inherited assumption alone.
Human beings genuinely experience awe, transcendence, presence, grace, unity, calling, ecstasy, terror, surrender, and profound meaning.
These experiences are real as experiences.
They deserve respect.
They deserve disciplined attention.
They deserve theology.
But if someone wishes to move from those experiences to the claim that a supernatural being or realm independently exists, I will now ask what evidence warrants that conclusion.
Not because I wish to destroy religion.
Because I take religion seriously.
I am not interested in explaining religious experience away.
I want to understand it well enough that we do not have to explain it by assertion.
That is my ground.
That is naturalistic theology.
And increasingly, I believe that is the work Opthē is here to do.